mid-sized

With subdued styling, excellent driving dynamics, and weak yen helping keep the R&D costs down, it’s no surprise that Honda’s latest Accords are hot-sellers. What may be surprising is that this year’s Green Car of the Year awards panelists couldn’t agree on what car to give the award to. What they did, insteand, was give it to three: the 2014 Honda Accord, Accord Hybrid, and Accord PHEV! You can check out the full story, below, in an article that originally appeared on the Environment News Service. Enjoy!

LOS ANGELES, California, November 22, 2013 (ENS) – The 2014 Honda Accord has been chosen as the Green Car of the Year®, but this year the award goes not to just one model but three: the Accord, Accord Hybrid, and Accord Plug-In Hybrid. “Green Car…

The new for 2014 Honda Accord Hybrid goes on sale today, with a reasonable pricetag, a 50 MPG EPA rating, an almost impossibly low-emissions 4 cylinder engine, a torquey electric motor, and withOUT a conventional transmission.

As I mentioned in my initial review of Honda’s 50 MPG Accord Hybrid earlier this month, this new Honda is different from other hybrids. Instead of an engine connecting to a conventional gearbox or CVT, the new Honda’s engine is directly connected to the drive wheels. The torque multiplication of lower gears is simulated with variable input from the electric motors at low speeds. As before, the best way to sum it up is like this: the 50 MPG Accord Hybrid drives exactly, precisely, and inimitably like a slot-car.

The batteries, electric motors, and Earth Dreams engine inside Honda’s new hybrid are definitely awesome, but the real magic to the car is in its ECU …

… which is massive.

The 2014 Honda Accord Hybrid’s driving dynamics and fuel efficiency all come down to that box up there. Much more than a conventional ECU, the Honda unit acts as a voltage converter and capacitor, handling how much juice goes from the battery to the motor and back into the battery during regenerative braking and engine braking. It’s a marvel, and it’s complicated enough that the three Honda reps I was listening to describe all did so using slightly different, equally simple, deceptively confusing analogies. Still, the system works- the implication there being that Honda’s engineers are smarter than me … and I can live with that.

You can buy the 2014 Honda Accord Hybrid today for as little as $29,155, which climbs to $34,905 with all the digital, leather, and sliding see-through roof goodies tacked on. So, that’s it. Go out and get you one.

Here it is, the revolutionary new for 2014, 50 MPG Accord Hybrid. Before we get too far into my driving impressions of the car, though, I want to make a few things clear. First, the new Accord hybrid is a revelation. Second, In-n-Out Burger is seriously overrated. It’s all about the vastly superior Whataburger, and that was the first stop I (and the similarly burger-wise Jeff Palmer, from Temple of VTEC) made in Honda’s newest toy.

At that point in the drive, the Whataburger manager rushing into the parking lot to ask us why we were taking pictures of the Whataburger was the most exciting thing about the drive. I was riding along in the passenger seat. The roads weren’t particularly twisty or elevation-change-y. The Accord was, from the front passenger seat, an Accord. It was excellent, in typical Honda, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d fly a dozen journalists out to a swanky hotel to ooh and aah over, you know?

I was about to express something along those lines to my eager pilot, in fact, when the roads started to get twisty, and some kind of sick change came over him. Out of nowhere, he decides he’s some long-lost AndrettiEarnhardt Senna heir, and we are screaming into corners – which are clearly marked “35” – at almost 70 mph. I know how fast we were going, because I was afraid, the tires were howling, and I pulled the bitch move of looking at the speedometer.

“Sure it is,” I thought. Still, I stayed mostly quiet about the speed we were carrying into corners, thinking about how I’d been on racetracks with guys named Andretti, Kendall, and Frentzen (among others) at seriously Serious speeds, and how I was going to die in the middle of Texas because some frustrated race-car-driver-turned-blogger wanted to see how the new Accord Hybrid compared to the S2000.

We drove until we saw the giant armadillo …

… then switched seats.

I spent some time adjusting the Honda Accord’s driver’s seat. Height, seat angle, steering wheel – they’re all adjustable. I made sure I could see out the mirrors, and I took a quick inventory of the dash. Big speedo. No tach. Looking down, I saw “P R N D B” in the console. I drove around a bit in “D”, like a good little auto-journo, until we pulled into a Honda-designated checkpoint at a golf course, where Jeff got out to snap some pics of the car.

“What’s ‘B mode’?” I asked Jeff, now happily buckled into the passenger seat.

“Braking,” he explained. “It uses the engine and electric motors to slow the car down and charge the batteries. Put it in ‘B’, that’s what I was using.”

Fair enough. We pulled out onto the twisty, hilly roads outside of San Antonio in a 50 MPG Honda Accord Hybrid, and I immediately started speeding.

I couldn’t help it.

It was the car.

“Damn!” I said, whooshing through another corner way too easily.

Jeff just nodded.

In “D”, the car feels limp and stupid. Avoid D.

In “B” mode, with an almost 1:1 connection between your foot and the Accord’s speed, it’s perfect. Understand, too, as you read all this, that I am supremely jaded when it comes to “sporty” cars. I ride motorcycles. In addition, over the last 15-16 years I’ve been driving Moslers, Ferraris, AMG Mercedes, Corvettes, Lamborghinis, Porsches, and (of course) 1000+ HP Nissan GTRs fairly regularly. None of them were as bonehead simple to make go fast in real-world conditions as the Honda. None of them were as smooth, and – with the exception of a particularly eager blue Mosler Raptor maybe a dozen years ago – none of those cars actually made me smile.

This new Honda is different. Its engine is directly connected to the drive wheels with clutches that use variable input from the electric motors to make up for the lack of torque multiplication at low revs. I’ll cover that in my next Honda Accord Hybrid article, though – all you need to know is this: the 50 MPG Accord Hybrid drives exactly, precisely, and inimitably like a slot-car.

Want to slow down? Back off the gas pedal. In my tester, backing off hauled the car down from 50-ish mph to 20-ish quickly enough to make braking through the twisty roads optional. Even in stop-and-go, there was almost no coasting. Give it a bit of gas, it rolled forward slowly. Take your foot off, and the car stopped. Go into a corner too hot? Back off the gas. Tires still quiet mid-corner? Give it a bit more … now, maybe a bit more. I SAID GIVE IT MORE, DAMMIT!! All of that, and we never – no matter how we pushed the car in B mode – saw MPG drop below 46.

Most of the time, we saw more than 60 mpg.

All that said, the only thing this new Accord Hybrid needs to be the perfect everyday car is a set of tasteful-looking performance wheels to replace the factory hubcap simulators and a set of grippy tires to replace the low-rolling resistance nonsense the cars were saddled with during our test drive. Make that swap, paint the thing mouse gray, and you’d have a perfect high-speed Q-ship to blast down the highway with.

“That’s what we wanted,” said Art St. Cyr, head of Honda’s motorsports program and one of the company execs on-hand at the event. “We wanted it to be a hybrid and we wanted to hit a number (presumably, he meant that 50 MPG mark), but we wanted it to be fun.”

Based on my experience driving Honda’s gas-powered V6 coupe version of the Accord (with the 6-speed manual), as well as the 4 and 6-cylinder gas versions (also on hand) I think Art’s nailed it. The 50 mpg Accord Hybrid is the best Honda Accord. It’s the most fun Accord you can buy – and also the most expensive. But, hey- you get what you pay for, right?

Featured Motorcycle Posts

Advertisement

The content produced by this site is for entertainment purposes only. Opinions and comments published on this site may not be sanctioned by, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sustainable Enterprises Media, Inc., its owners, sponsors, affiliates, or subsidiaries.

The content produced by this site is for entertainment purposes only. Opinions and comments published on this site may not be sanctioned by, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sustainable Enterprises Media, Inc., its owners, sponsors, affiliates, or subsidiaries.